While all the details aren’t out yet. It looks like Time Warner Cable/Road Runner took a 10 minute network outage today at 6:10 PDT.

From what I noted and backed up with other online resources, it looks like there may have been a “flap” with one of the core routers (pulled from DSL reports board).

Even some speculation that it may have been related to this issue noted via twitter regarding the a Juniper bug and a BGP route distribution.

Regardless the hit was widespread and has shown to have disrupted services across the globe.

Noticeable? Absolutely. Sadly the first indication I received was from my wife indicating that nothing at home was working. Instinct was to call the TWC help number already preprogrammed into my phone. When the major support numbers from TWC all inaccessible, it occurred to me that there may have been more than a local outage.

When we finally saw some monitoring reports, it was confirmed. My wife is quicker than your average network monitoring tool. 🙂

If you know what DOCSIS 3.0 is, please stop reading now… this posting will be of no interest to you. For everyone else (and I’m thinking that’s alot of people), please read on.

I’ve been through a few versions of Time Warner‘s cable modem offerings and spent some time as a system admin when the first cable modems were being deployed. You can say that I’ve had some exposure to the technology on the delivery side and the consumer side. I’ve even dipped my toes into the FTTH (fiber to the home) services like AT&T’s U-verse. Nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the quality and consistency I’ve received out of this service so far.

When I first ran a speed test, I giggled (and that’s not something you necessarily want to admit on the Internet). I’ve seen $8000 a month commercial services try and have download speeds and ping responses at this level. Granted the upload speeds are a 10th (as expected) but as a home user, other than uploading pictures to Picassaweb or Smugmug, it’s not that big of a concern.

The first day we had this, I had to share my joy (i.e. brag) so I posted the speed results to my Facebook wall. One of my astute networking friends quickly asked “are you really going to use all that bandwidth”. Well, no. Not now at least.

What can I do with it? More than I could with my previous 6Mb/s U-verse service. With U-verse I couldn’t reliably watch Netflix. Switching to TWC Wideband make the Netflix experience enjoyable. At the time, I was able to stream Netflix to two different Apple TVs, a computer, and an iPad without any degradation. Now that Netflix has limited you to one concurrent stream, I can’t do that anymore. But I have the bandwidth if I could.

With this bandwidth as a springboard, we took the plunge and dropped the U-verse television service also. With that, we have gone cable/satellite free. And free is to be interpreted as “without” as opposed to “for less money”. With the cost of the wideband service, plus the number of small boxes I’ve bought to interface with our TVs and the various subscription services (HULU, Netflix, PlayOn, etc) I’m not sure there are any financial benefits to this approach yet.

For about half the cost I could have had the TWC 30Mb/service. But what fun would that have been? The 50 meg service has a “guaranteed” 40Mb/s SLA (service level agreement). I have this information from both the tech that did the install and the person I ordered it from at TWC. Granted I’ve not found this anywhere else online, so I lack the ability to substantiate that claim beyond what I was told. Many are not going to have a consistent measurement to see if they are getting the full throughput at all times (unless they have a spare Linksys running MRTG at home and I told them to stop reading in the first sentence). At best I’m doing spot checks with a less than scientific website (speedtest.net) but I’m getting pretty pictures each time I check it. 🙂

Is any of this scientific. No. But as far as putting a stake in the ground as to what’s possible for the next gen of service offerings, I think TWC has done very well.